Is John McCain's Pick to Lead the International Republican Institute a Strike Against Donald Trump?

With a literal thumbs-down late last month, Senator John McCain’s “Nay” vote doomed President Trump and the Senate Republicans’ latest effort to erase Obamacare from the books. (The debate continues about whether "repeal and replace" is dead or just a zombie for now.)

The IRI is the GOP's democracy-building organization, the twin of the National Democratic Institute, which is chaired by heavy hitter Democrat Madeleine Albright. As the longtime chairman of the IRI, McCain chairs its board and plays a key role in choosing its leadership—and that choice can send a signal. A onetime foreign policy advisor to McCain, Twining is currently Counselor and Director of the Asia Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Turns out Albright has something else in common with Twining: She and McCain’s new IRI president both endorsed Hillary Clinton for president last year.

“If you'd told me a year ago, that I'd be for her, like publicly, I would have said, ‘You're nuts’, but that's just where we are," Twining told the West Australian news paper in a story published last October. “Funnily enough, she’s the Republican on foreign policy in this race. She's the hawk. She's the one who wants to stand up to China and Russia. I think the chances of doing the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] are much higher under her ... she would both reassure our allies and slightly unsettle our competitors and that's the right candidate to support.”

Daniel Twining

Getty Images

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To be sure, Trump wasn’t the first choice of many Washington Republicans—and Clinton wasn’t Twining’s first choice either. He first supported Jeb Bush and then Senator Marco Rubio over Trump as the future President sliced and diced the crowd of establishment Republicans in the crowded 2016 primary field.

Twining was far from alone among the political cognoscenti in predicting Trump’s defeat but he was more vocal than some. A few weeks after his comments to the Australian paper, Twining scalded Trump in an October 27 op-ed in Japan’s Nikkei Asian Review. Twining was far from alone among the political cognoscenti in predicting Trump’s defeat:

“The Republican nightmare is not that Trump loses—he deserves to, on his own merits—but that he takes the current Republican majorities in Congress down with him, further damaging his party's fortunes.

“Should they hold on to control of Congress, Republican leaders like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator Marco Rubio must rebuild their party around principles radically different from those espoused by Trump, which will be much easier to do if they remain in charge and he suffers a landslide defeat that discredits his protectionism and unilateralism.”

Fast forward a week and Trump beat Clinton, confounding Twining and most other pundits. Trump went on to pick current IRI president Mark Green to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, which helps fund the IRI and NDI. That opened up the position for which McCain named Twining on August 2.

Twining did not respond to an email seeking his comment from the spokesperson for the German Marshall Fund. McCain’s communications director, Julie Tarallo, did not return emails seeking comment; an IRI spokesperson did not immediately have any comment.

But a longtime McCain friend and collaborator, writer Mark Salter, said Twining is well qualified and that McCain and the IRI board would never select a new head of the organization out of personal pique. (McCain has perhaps more cause than most to needle Trump after the future president mocked McCain’s status as a Vietnam war hero POW, saying that he liked veterans who “weren’t captured.”)

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“[McCain] doesn’t make decisions based on personal animus,” said Salter. “it would have nothing to do with it. He’s known Dan a long time, Dan worked with him, his foreign affairs advisor for a long time…. He’s well qualified and understands the mission of IRI.”

Some mainstream Republicans who are close to IRI told Town & Country it was unseemly to install a never-Trumper there for a range of reasons.

For one, there is the notion that his pre-election views favoring Clinton over Trump would precede him in the fragile budding democracies where the IRI tries to help legislative and executive branch institutions take root and replace dictatorships of old. In addition, some say most IRI staff may be Republicans but stay non-political in the public conduct, in contrast to Twining’s strong statements against Trump as he faced an underdog campaign against Clinton.

In addition, while Twining is a full-fledged denizen of Washington think tank fulmination, he has little management experience, while IRI has a large staff, many offices around the world, and has faced challenges as grave as life and death security issues on the ground.

Factors like that are why some Republicans see the pick as McCain giving Trump a classic New York gesture. But Salter says McCain likely isn’t even aware of Twining’s opposition to Trump. “I can guarantee Senator McCain probably doesn’t even know” and the selection “was on the merits.”

“Just like on the healthcare vote,” Salter added. “People asserted maybe he did that to get back at Trump for some real or perceived slight. He didn’t. He did it on the merits and this is an appointment on the merits. It’s nothing more complicated than that.”

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